Computer systems have traditionally consisted of physical machines. Virtual machines are software simulations of the hardware components of a physical machine. Although a physical machine host is required for implementation of one or more virtual machines, virtualization permits consolidation of computing resources otherwise distributed across multiple physical machines to fewer or even a single host physical machine. The consolidation enables reductions in space, power, cooling, and hardware requirements.
A virtual machine can be moved between physical machines to balance workloads, utilize faster physical machines, or to recover from a hardware fault on a physical machine. The benefits of virtualization have resulted in the development of virtual machine management tools.
One limitation of prior art virtual machine management tools is a lack of support for managing physical machines. Another limitation is the lack of variety of virtualization platforms that are supported on a single virtual machine management tool.
Although virtualization offers many positive benefits, there are still applications for which a physical machine is needed. The virtual machine management tool is incapable of managing such a physical machine. Over time, an organization is also likely to have legacy or other reasons that require maintaining virtual machines that are not supported by the virtual machine management tool.
While the use of virtualization can lead to reductions in the cost of deploying and managing computers, the inability to use the same management tool to manage all of the individual machines forming the computer system as a whole tends to increase the cost and complexity of managing the system as a whole.